Content Management System Spam

Update June 27, 2005: December 2004 through February 2005 I was part of Marqui’s “Pay to Blog” program. I wrote about them and linked to them once a week. During the three-month program I had this icon displayed on my site in the right sidebar area.

I usually ignore spam or don’t see it at all if my filters pick it up. The other day I was organizing my inbox and came across an email with the subject line: “Content management comes to life in new demo.” At first I thought it was an email from Marqui, the communications management system I’m being paid to write about until the end of February. Nope! It was spam from what appears to be one of their competitors: EMC²’s Documentum. Then I thought perhaps they sent this piece of spam to the bloggers writing for Marqui. Unlikely, but possible. Upon further inspection of the email header, I noticed that the spam was sent to an email address at sooz.com that I stopped using over a year ago. Looks like it was just some sort of random coincidence that I’m currently checking out a content management system.

The email tries to lure me over to the Documentum website to view a Flash demo of the product. I clicked the “See it now!” link and landed on a page that asked me to provide my first name, last name and email address to view the demo. First they spam me, and now they want my contact information just to view a demo? Marqui does not try to use their Flash demo as a lame lead generation tool. Since EMC² has already messed up their attempt to build some sort of relationship with me with spam, the least they could do is let me view the Flash demo without collecting additional contact information.

Here’s a PDF of the spam I received. Similar to Marqui’s “The Marketerï¿½s Guide to Optimizing Your Web Content for Search Engines“, EMC&#178 wants my contact information for a whitepaper linked in the spam about their content management “15-minute guide”. Which is unfortunate on both of their parts. But I guess the consolation for Marqui is whether or not they spam to get this information. Either way, they should let the information speak for itself. If it’s useful and relevant then they’ll hear from the potential customer.